8 ms·

More developers now use OS X than Linux

50 points by oneeyedpigeon 11y ago

elcapitan 11y ago
The diagram is a bit misleading as it separates out Windows users by OS version, although they are still the majority, not Mac users.
dhd415 11y ago
More StackOverflow survey respondents use OSX than Linux. It's unlikely that StackOverflow survey respondents constitute a representative sampling of all developers.
- svckr 11y ago
  I think it might come close, though. I mean, yes, there might be some percentage of Linux users that get all their answers from good old mailing lists, but surely the bias should not be that big?
  - dhd415 11y ago
    There's a pretty big discrepancy between the popular technologies on StackOverflow and the TIOBE index (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index), so I think there's a significant possibility of bias. I think there are a set of technologies for which StackOverflow is seen as a good resource and other technologies for which StackOverflow has much less useful information and that results in some bias by virtue of self-selection.
    - cholantesh 11y ago
      I only gave a cursory glance, but I don't think the discrepancy is that vast. The most significant difference I saw was the growth trend and position of Javascript. That said, I think you're right in that StackOverflow's demographic doesn't represent the wider marketplace - web development, particularly of the .NET and Java varieties, as well as DB development is probably over-represented on SO.
      - Normal_gaussian 11y ago
        We were just talking about this in the office. We all use linux (one uses a Mac - temporary iOS developer...) and we work across the "full stack" from embedded to web. When working on embedded, C, Postgres, or pretty much anything that is completely UIless we get most of our information from short to the point blogs, with 1/3 or less from SO. When working on web (php, node, css/js/popular framework) or mobile we pretty much exclusively use SO. The blogs and documentation here are full of stupid terms and too much text. The other cases I was thinking of were Python and R. Both of which I found were SO heavy, and whose blogs seemed awfully similar to the front end stuff.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  It's probably the closest we have though, unless you have another source in mind?
  - eloisant 11y ago
    If you want statistics that make a minimum of sense, you need a representative sample. "Anyone who was willing to respond" is not representative, which is why any internet survey where anyone can respond is garbage. To create a representative sample, you need knowledge on your population. For survey on the general population of a given country or state, the census data is used. You know what percentage of your population is in a given age bracket, their occupation, their gender, their family situation, etc. and you build a sample with the same proportions.
    - hoorayimhelping 11y ago
      Thanks for explaining what a representative sample is, I think we're all a little better off now. I think the question still stands though: does anyone have a more representative survey than the Stack Overflow one?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- digi_owl 11y ago
  I wonder how many of them are web devs that picked up OSX thanks to getting into the biz via some mutated media studies course.
  - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
    Well, I'm a web dev who picked up OSX about 5 years ago, having used Windows in the industry for about 10 years, after I'd used Windows/Linux for 3 years before that during my Computer Science degree. So I guess I don't fit that particular stereotype, and I doubt that many people do (I've never met one).
gabemart 11y ago
This seems like very thinly veiled blogspam around http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#technology-desktop-operating-system http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  You're right. To give them their due, 9to5mac do clearly credit the source, but they add little analysis, and the page is, frankly, terrible. I actually regret submitting this now (the original stackoverflow source is far superior) but this is how I was alerted to the data, via my RSS feed. Sorry.
huuu 11y ago
Link to the survey: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016
tzaman 11y ago
Can we now have native Docker support, Apple? Pretty please? :)
plugnburn 11y ago
Facepalm.
fit2rule 11y ago
Not for long. This will be my last Macbook, because frankly, its too expensive, and there are great, simply great, Linux laptops out there, which after all will give me all the same power, all the same. I attribute my dis-interest in what has been a decade of OSX adoption (after a decade of Linux/Unix), as a result of having to think, too many times, about the sandbox, the API rules, brew update && brew upgrade && brew doctor, and so on.
- bogomipz 11y ago
  I'm with you, OS X just seems to always be in the way of getting stuff done now a days, there was quite a long time where OS X just stayed out of your way, that's no longer the case. I have also had my share of hardware issues - wifi/blue tooth radios that stop working after two years(just gotta replace the logic board), displays that stop working to name a few. The sad fact is that the amount of Apple annoyances/frustrations now reminds me of of Microsoft which is the reason I switched to begin with. Out of curiosity what hardware are you maybe looking at?
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    If all goes well, I'll switch to something like this: http://www.razerzone.com/store/razer-blade-stealth http://www.razerzone.com/store/razer-blade-stealth As long as it feels as comfortable as a Macbook, with decent performance, I'm willing to switch completely.
- eggy 11y ago
  I find dual-booting Linux and Windows gives me most of all possible worlds. I gave up my Apple Developer status because of the lock-in to just the Apple system. Frankly, Swift looks almost the same as Kotlin, which I picked up first (but have since dropped for LFE, Lisp Flavoured Erlang).
  - darreld 11y ago
    My feeling as well. I went all-in on the Mac in late 2001 and have bought several Macs since then. I am now feeling like Linux/Windows dual-boot fits me better than OSX. I'll be replacing my aging MBP w/ a laptop that supports this. Not sure what yet though.
hacker_9 11y ago
This smells of biased fanboyism. Firstly Windows users make up of 50% of the graph, so why doesn't that get any interest? And secondly the difference between OSX and Linux is 4.5%, from a small sample group, not newsworthy at all. I expect more people dev on OSX simply because of wanting to design for IOS, and being locking into the OS to do so.
- V-2 11y ago
  I wouldn't suspect such fanboyism on StackOverflow's part (they conducted the survey). Apart from that I believe you're largely right. I had to switch from Windows to OS X for this reason exactly. I'm an Android dev joined a Xamarin team recently, and you can't work on the iOS version lest you have an OS X machine. As far as UX goes, I'm not too pleased with the transition.
- madmax96 11y ago
  >small sample group 56,000 respondents is a small sample?
  - HemanHeartYou 11y ago
    Yes actually, that is a small sample.
    - madmax96 11y ago
      The random variable `X = # of developers who use OS X` is a binomial distribution (a developer either uses OS X or doesn't, each developer has an equal probability of using OS X [1], and the experiment is the survey). To achieve an error bound of B for a binomial distribution, then we need n = 1/B^2 experiments. Solving for B, we get B = sqrt(1/n). Thus, the error bound of this experiment is theoretically B = sqrt(1/56,000) ~ 0.004. I'm by no means a stats guru, so correct me if I'm wrong. But that seems like a pretty good error rate to me. The criticism that StackOverflow isn't a good representation of the general developer community still might be valid. I honestly don't know enough about its demographics to make any educated opinion about that statement. [1] I make this assumption because there a finite set of jobs. Even if a developer's job requires them to use Windows, they had an equal probability of another developer of having a job that allowed them the freedom to choose their platform/required them to use OS X.
darreld 11y ago
I'm admittedly sitting in the enterprise but I don't seriously believe a third of all developers are using Swift. This definitely feels like cheerleading.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  I can't even work out where they've drawn that conclusion from; maybe it's not even based on the Stackoverflow dataset, but something that 9to5mac has obtained from elsewhere. To be fair, they do say "In mobile development ... Swift is now used by almost a third of developers"; I think it might just be poorly written.
skywhopper 11y ago
Given that the respondents are StackOverflow users that skews the numbers right from the start. The large sample size is irrelevant. It's mildly interesting data but I wouldn't draw any conclusions about the atate of the industry from it.
thearn4 11y ago
FWIW, I'm a developer on a macbook largely because I would like a portable UNIX-y system that doesn't suck. With drivers that work consistently, and UI (hardware and software) that feels like it was actually tested by an end user. I had a debian thinkpad while in graduate school that did what I needed it to do, but still ended up being extremely finicky after a few years (especially WIFI and power management). Despite always wanting to do work with computers, I've accepted the fact that I really don't want to have to play sysadmin on some personal machines, and am willing to pay to have them just work. edit: one extra note, regardless of what platform I am developing with, my deployment target is typically some form of Linux HPC cluster, so I don't know if the OS X vs. Linux argument is particularly clear cut. I use both (and windows), but in very different ways. I don't have a clear incentive to pick one platform for everything.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > FWIW, I'm a developer on a macbook largely because I would like a portable UNIX-y system that doesn't suck. This is pretty much why I switched to a MacBook too. Windows is a workable desktop OS, and it has great software support for things other than developer tools (I can also play games, for example). Unfortunately, its lack of UNIXness means half the open-source software world (at least, the portions I care about) doesn't work well with it, and this is a pain. Because I wanted something UNIXy, I switched to Ubuntu (more than once), but the desktop experience isn't great (in particular, both my graphics and my sound were broken) and non-developer application support is poor (few games I wanted to play were supported or worked, not to mention other things). OS X, on the other hand, has a solid desktop experience, sufficiently UNIXy underpinnings for development purposes, and has good enough application support for my needs. I do have the option of switching over to Windows on this thing, but tellingly I haven't in the two years I've had it. (I do have a Boot Camp partition for Windows, but it exists for the sake of a single game. Everything else I want to do can be done in OS X.) While using Windows or Ubuntu it usually took less time than that before I got fed up and switched OS yet again. My experiences aren't representative, of course. I don't just do web app and systems programming on my computer. If I did, I'd probably be fine with Linux. But sometimes I also do things like browse the web (including watching YouTube videos and using web pages which have WebGL), dabble in game development (Unity's editor doesn't run well under WINE), edit videos (there's no good Linux video editor), play games, and so on. I'm also someone who doesn't like dual-booting. I don't want to have to deal with two completely different operating systems with their own user interfaces, and have to stop one activity and reboot if I want to do a different activity. I don't want to have to deal with the mess that is trying to share files between different OSes.
meeper16 11y ago
This really depends on what kind of developers your're talking about here. web developers? core software engineers? core system level engineers? algorithm engineers?
blakesterz 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand what to take away from "Priorities Change With Experience [0] Everything becomes more important the older we get? New developers are just so happy to have a job that nothing is important? It's just a strange looking chart that doesn't seem to really make much sense. Nothing matters, and then a decade later everything matters more? http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#priorities-change-with-experience http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#prio...
blakesterz 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand what to take away from "Priorities Change With Experience [0] Everything becomes more important the older we get? New developers are just so happy to have a job that nothing is important? It's just a strange looking chart that doesn't seem to really make much sense. Nothing matters, and then a decade later everything matters more? http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#priorities-change-with-experience http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#prio...
diego_moita 11y ago
More developers that answer surveys on Stackoverflow. This skews very strongly away from non-native english speakers. The participation of Chinese, Japanese, Russians and Latin Americans on this survey is just ridiculous. You can see also a clear web & mobile bias on the survey page: [1] http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  In fairness, the programming world as a whole has a bias against people without strong English abilities.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
notacoward 11y ago
Highly misleading clickbait. The implication is that people actually develop on OSX, but the actual question was what people use for their desktop OS. The difference lies in those who use OSX essentially as a terminal, from which they connect to their actual Linux development environment in a VM or on a remote machine. Like hundreds of other people where I work (Red Hat) I work full time on Linux from a non-Linux laptop. I've done it from Windows (before RH), I've done it from OSX, and now I'm doing it from a very sweet Chromebook Pixel. I haven't actually programmed on a Mac since the System 7 days, but 9to5mac would spin it as though I was among the (really very few) developers who have abandoned Linux for OSX as a dev platform. That's quite dishonest of them.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  Not that I'm arguing that it isn't a misleading title, but when you say "Like hundreds of other people where I work (Red Hat) I work full time on Linux from a non-Linux laptop.", how many of those are using Macs? I wouldn't personally consider working this way because of the cost; if I wanted to run Linux, I would purchase a much cheaper laptop to do it on. Are there really that many people that work on Linux full-time but are willing to pay 3-4 times more just for superior build quality?
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Yeah i am surprised they are going for Linux in a VM on Mac rather than Linux on a Thinkpad, as Lenovo even accommodates RHEL on them.
  - notacoward 11y ago
    It varies a lot across the company. The great majority use very boring company-provided laptops running Linux natively, but a significant number use personally owned machines - usually Macs. Over on the JBoss side, it seems to be all Macs all the time. However, that doesn't mean the development is actually happening on the same machine as code editing or web browsing. Even with a Linux laptop, there's often a need to run a very specific version of RHEL for all testing. If you're running Fedora, that's not going to cut it, so the habit everywhere is to use VMs or machines in a lab somewhere for the actual work.
thunderbong 11y ago
I've worked in both the open source world and the closed source (dot net) world. In my very humble opinion, the dot net world just doesn't need the amount of online help that the open source world needs at least not from StackOverflow. Dot Net and it's kin tend to have very good help out of the box and extensive documentation. This is very much unlike in open source where honestly, it's not even possible to install an operating system without having another computer available online. Again, I'm not dissing open source here. I've learnt a whole lot from it. But there's many, many things that are lacking in open source, which when seen from the other side seem extremely basic and fundamental to creating good software.
- takno 11y ago
  Not really sure the strange and inaccurate comment about needing another computer available online to install an open source OS really adds much to your argument here. Java also has excellent out of the box documentation. Tools which are developed commercially often have better documentation whether the source is open or not, and where there is good documentation Stack overflow usually becomes a last resort rather than a useful reference. Either way it's something I look at for specific questions, not as some kind of community where I go to answer surveys
hashkb 11y ago
Well, Apple forces you to develop for iOS in XCode, right? And startups get deals on Macbooks... So this really is not so much remarkable as inevitable.
CyanLite2 11y ago
According to the report, at least 71.2% of all development is happening inside Windows or a Windows VM (Visual Studio and Notepad++ are Windows only). Sounds like a lot of folks are using Macs to host a Windows VM, which I see all the time. If you include a small portion of Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, Xamarin then you're probably approaching 80% of all development being done on gasp Windows.
Grue3 11y ago
A Stack Overflow poll is not representative of what developers use. Otherwise you'd have to believe that most developers code on Notepad in Windows. Indeed, people who learn to program, the target audience of Stack Overflow, often code in Notepad. I did too, before I switched to Emacs. And these days I only end up on Stack Overflow via occasional googling, and certainly wouldn't participiate in their polls.
mchahn 11y ago
The last geeky conference I went to, Github's Atom conference, I saw virtually nothing but Macbooks. I've even seen a presentation by Microsoft given on a Macbook.
sandGorgon 11y ago
People should really check out the new Thinkpad T460s - actual upgradability, looks spectacular, carbon fiber , brilliant Linux compatibility. Takes the new Samsung 960 Pro NVME and works brilliantly.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

50 points by oneeyedpigeon 11y ago

The diagram is a bit misleading as it separates out Windows users by OS version, although they are still the majority, not Mac users.

dhd415 11y ago

More StackOverflow survey respondents use OSX than Linux. It's unlikely that StackOverflow survey respondents constitute a representative sampling of all developers.

svckr 11y ago
I think it might come close, though. I mean, yes, there might be some percentage of Linux users that get all their answers from good old mailing lists, but surely the bias should not be that big?
- dhd415 11y ago
  There's a pretty big discrepancy between the popular technologies on StackOverflow and the TIOBE index (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index), so I think there's a significant possibility of bias. I think there are a set of technologies for which StackOverflow is seen as a good resource and other technologies for which StackOverflow has much less useful information and that results in some bias by virtue of self-selection.
  - cholantesh 11y ago
    I only gave a cursory glance, but I don't think the discrepancy is that vast. The most significant difference I saw was the growth trend and position of Javascript. That said, I think you're right in that StackOverflow's demographic doesn't represent the wider marketplace - web development, particularly of the .NET and Java varieties, as well as DB development is probably over-represented on SO.
    - Normal_gaussian 11y ago
      We were just talking about this in the office. We all use linux (one uses a Mac - temporary iOS developer...) and we work across the "full stack" from embedded to web. When working on embedded, C, Postgres, or pretty much anything that is completely UIless we get most of our information from short to the point blogs, with 1/3 or less from SO. When working on web (php, node, css/js/popular framework) or mobile we pretty much exclusively use SO. The blogs and documentation here are full of stupid terms and too much text. The other cases I was thinking of were Python and R. Both of which I found were SO heavy, and whose blogs seemed awfully similar to the front end stuff.
oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
It's probably the closest we have though, unless you have another source in mind?
- eloisant 11y ago
  If you want statistics that make a minimum of sense, you need a representative sample. "Anyone who was willing to respond" is not representative, which is why any internet survey where anyone can respond is garbage. To create a representative sample, you need knowledge on your population. For survey on the general population of a given country or state, the census data is used. You know what percentage of your population is in a given age bracket, their occupation, their gender, their family situation, etc. and you build a sample with the same proportions.
  - hoorayimhelping 11y ago
    Thanks for explaining what a representative sample is, I think we're all a little better off now. I think the question still stands though: does anyone have a more representative survey than the Stack Overflow one?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
digi_owl 11y ago
I wonder how many of them are web devs that picked up OSX thanks to getting into the biz via some mutated media studies course.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  Well, I'm a web dev who picked up OSX about 5 years ago, having used Windows in the industry for about 10 years, after I'd used Windows/Linux for 3 years before that during my Computer Science degree. So I guess I don't fit that particular stereotype, and I doubt that many people do (I've never met one).

gabemart 11y ago

This seems like very thinly veiled blogspam around http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#technology-desktop-operating-system http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...

oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
You're right. To give them their due, 9to5mac do clearly credit the source, but they add little analysis, and the page is, frankly, terrible. I actually regret submitting this now (the original stackoverflow source is far superior) but this is how I was alerted to the data, via my RSS feed. Sorry.

huuu 11y ago

Link to the survey: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

tzaman 11y ago

Can we now have native Docker support, Apple? Pretty please? :)

plugnburn 11y ago

Facepalm.

fit2rule 11y ago

Not for long. This will be my last Macbook, because frankly, its too expensive, and there are great, simply great, Linux laptops out there, which after all will give me all the same power, all the same. I attribute my dis-interest in what has been a decade of OSX adoption (after a decade of Linux/Unix), as a result of having to think, too many times, about the sandbox, the API rules, brew update && brew upgrade && brew doctor, and so on.

bogomipz 11y ago
I'm with you, OS X just seems to always be in the way of getting stuff done now a days, there was quite a long time where OS X just stayed out of your way, that's no longer the case. I have also had my share of hardware issues - wifi/blue tooth radios that stop working after two years(just gotta replace the logic board), displays that stop working to name a few. The sad fact is that the amount of Apple annoyances/frustrations now reminds me of of Microsoft which is the reason I switched to begin with. Out of curiosity what hardware are you maybe looking at?
- fit2rule 11y ago
  If all goes well, I'll switch to something like this: http://www.razerzone.com/store/razer-blade-stealth http://www.razerzone.com/store/razer-blade-stealth As long as it feels as comfortable as a Macbook, with decent performance, I'm willing to switch completely.
eggy 11y ago
I find dual-booting Linux and Windows gives me most of all possible worlds. I gave up my Apple Developer status because of the lock-in to just the Apple system. Frankly, Swift looks almost the same as Kotlin, which I picked up first (but have since dropped for LFE, Lisp Flavoured Erlang).
- darreld 11y ago
  My feeling as well. I went all-in on the Mac in late 2001 and have bought several Macs since then. I am now feeling like Linux/Windows dual-boot fits me better than OSX. I'll be replacing my aging MBP w/ a laptop that supports this. Not sure what yet though.

hacker_9 11y ago

This smells of biased fanboyism. Firstly Windows users make up of 50% of the graph, so why doesn't that get any interest? And secondly the difference between OSX and Linux is 4.5%, from a small sample group, not newsworthy at all. I expect more people dev on OSX simply because of wanting to design for IOS, and being locking into the OS to do so.

V-2 11y ago
I wouldn't suspect such fanboyism on StackOverflow's part (they conducted the survey). Apart from that I believe you're largely right. I had to switch from Windows to OS X for this reason exactly. I'm an Android dev joined a Xamarin team recently, and you can't work on the iOS version lest you have an OS X machine. As far as UX goes, I'm not too pleased with the transition.
madmax96 11y ago
>small sample group 56,000 respondents is a small sample?
- HemanHeartYou 11y ago
  Yes actually, that is a small sample.
  - madmax96 11y ago
    The random variable `X = # of developers who use OS X` is a binomial distribution (a developer either uses OS X or doesn't, each developer has an equal probability of using OS X [1], and the experiment is the survey). To achieve an error bound of B for a binomial distribution, then we need n = 1/B^2 experiments. Solving for B, we get B = sqrt(1/n). Thus, the error bound of this experiment is theoretically B = sqrt(1/56,000) ~ 0.004. I'm by no means a stats guru, so correct me if I'm wrong. But that seems like a pretty good error rate to me. The criticism that StackOverflow isn't a good representation of the general developer community still might be valid. I honestly don't know enough about its demographics to make any educated opinion about that statement. [1] I make this assumption because there a finite set of jobs. Even if a developer's job requires them to use Windows, they had an equal probability of another developer of having a job that allowed them the freedom to choose their platform/required them to use OS X.

darreld 11y ago

I'm admittedly sitting in the enterprise but I don't seriously believe a third of all developers are using Swift. This definitely feels like cheerleading.

oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
I can't even work out where they've drawn that conclusion from; maybe it's not even based on the Stackoverflow dataset, but something that 9to5mac has obtained from elsewhere. To be fair, they do say "In mobile development ... Swift is now used by almost a third of developers"; I think it might just be poorly written.

skywhopper 11y ago

Given that the respondents are StackOverflow users that skews the numbers right from the start. The large sample size is irrelevant. It's mildly interesting data but I wouldn't draw any conclusions about the atate of the industry from it.

thearn4 11y ago

FWIW, I'm a developer on a macbook largely because I would like a portable UNIX-y system that doesn't suck. With drivers that work consistently, and UI (hardware and software) that feels like it was actually tested by an end user. I had a debian thinkpad while in graduate school that did what I needed it to do, but still ended up being extremely finicky after a few years (especially WIFI and power management). Despite always wanting to do work with computers, I've accepted the fact that I really don't want to have to play sysadmin on some personal machines, and am willing to pay to have them just work. edit: one extra note, regardless of what platform I am developing with, my deployment target is typically some form of Linux HPC cluster, so I don't know if the OS X vs. Linux argument is particularly clear cut. I use both (and windows), but in very different ways. I don't have a clear incentive to pick one platform for everything.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> FWIW, I'm a developer on a macbook largely because I would like a portable UNIX-y system that doesn't suck. This is pretty much why I switched to a MacBook too. Windows is a workable desktop OS, and it has great software support for things other than developer tools (I can also play games, for example). Unfortunately, its lack of UNIXness means half the open-source software world (at least, the portions I care about) doesn't work well with it, and this is a pain. Because I wanted something UNIXy, I switched to Ubuntu (more than once), but the desktop experience isn't great (in particular, both my graphics and my sound were broken) and non-developer application support is poor (few games I wanted to play were supported or worked, not to mention other things). OS X, on the other hand, has a solid desktop experience, sufficiently UNIXy underpinnings for development purposes, and has good enough application support for my needs. I do have the option of switching over to Windows on this thing, but tellingly I haven't in the two years I've had it. (I do have a Boot Camp partition for Windows, but it exists for the sake of a single game. Everything else I want to do can be done in OS X.) While using Windows or Ubuntu it usually took less time than that before I got fed up and switched OS yet again. My experiences aren't representative, of course. I don't just do web app and systems programming on my computer. If I did, I'd probably be fine with Linux. But sometimes I also do things like browse the web (including watching YouTube videos and using web pages which have WebGL), dabble in game development (Unity's editor doesn't run well under WINE), edit videos (there's no good Linux video editor), play games, and so on. I'm also someone who doesn't like dual-booting. I don't want to have to deal with two completely different operating systems with their own user interfaces, and have to stop one activity and reboot if I want to do a different activity. I don't want to have to deal with the mess that is trying to share files between different OSes.

meeper16 11y ago

This really depends on what kind of developers your're talking about here. web developers? core software engineers? core system level engineers? algorithm engineers?

blakesterz 11y ago

I'm not sure I understand what to take away from "Priorities Change With Experience [0] Everything becomes more important the older we get? New developers are just so happy to have a job that nothing is important? It's just a strange looking chart that doesn't seem to really make much sense. Nothing matters, and then a decade later everything matters more? http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#priorities-change-with-experience http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#prio...

blakesterz 11y ago

diego_moita 11y ago

More developers that answer surveys on Stackoverflow. This skews very strongly away from non-native english speakers. The participation of Chinese, Japanese, Russians and Latin Americans on this survey is just ridiculous. You can see also a clear web & mobile bias on the survey page: [1] http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
In fairness, the programming world as a whole has a bias against people without strong English abilities.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

notacoward 11y ago

Highly misleading clickbait. The implication is that people actually develop on OSX, but the actual question was what people use for their desktop OS. The difference lies in those who use OSX essentially as a terminal, from which they connect to their actual Linux development environment in a VM or on a remote machine. Like hundreds of other people where I work (Red Hat) I work full time on Linux from a non-Linux laptop. I've done it from Windows (before RH), I've done it from OSX, and now I'm doing it from a very sweet Chromebook Pixel. I haven't actually programmed on a Mac since the System 7 days, but 9to5mac would spin it as though I was among the (really very few) developers who have abandoned Linux for OSX as a dev platform. That's quite dishonest of them.

oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
Not that I'm arguing that it isn't a misleading title, but when you say "Like hundreds of other people where I work (Red Hat) I work full time on Linux from a non-Linux laptop.", how many of those are using Macs? I wouldn't personally consider working this way because of the cost; if I wanted to run Linux, I would purchase a much cheaper laptop to do it on. Are there really that many people that work on Linux full-time but are willing to pay 3-4 times more just for superior build quality?
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Yeah i am surprised they are going for Linux in a VM on Mac rather than Linux on a Thinkpad, as Lenovo even accommodates RHEL on them.
- notacoward 11y ago
  It varies a lot across the company. The great majority use very boring company-provided laptops running Linux natively, but a significant number use personally owned machines - usually Macs. Over on the JBoss side, it seems to be all Macs all the time. However, that doesn't mean the development is actually happening on the same machine as code editing or web browsing. Even with a Linux laptop, there's often a need to run a very specific version of RHEL for all testing. If you're running Fedora, that's not going to cut it, so the habit everywhere is to use VMs or machines in a lab somewhere for the actual work.

thunderbong 11y ago

I've worked in both the open source world and the closed source (dot net) world. In my very humble opinion, the dot net world just doesn't need the amount of online help that the open source world needs at least not from StackOverflow. Dot Net and it's kin tend to have very good help out of the box and extensive documentation. This is very much unlike in open source where honestly, it's not even possible to install an operating system without having another computer available online. Again, I'm not dissing open source here. I've learnt a whole lot from it. But there's many, many things that are lacking in open source, which when seen from the other side seem extremely basic and fundamental to creating good software.

takno 11y ago
Not really sure the strange and inaccurate comment about needing another computer available online to install an open source OS really adds much to your argument here. Java also has excellent out of the box documentation. Tools which are developed commercially often have better documentation whether the source is open or not, and where there is good documentation Stack overflow usually becomes a last resort rather than a useful reference. Either way it's something I look at for specific questions, not as some kind of community where I go to answer surveys

hashkb 11y ago

Well, Apple forces you to develop for iOS in XCode, right? And startups get deals on Macbooks... So this really is not so much remarkable as inevitable.

CyanLite2 11y ago

According to the report, at least 71.2% of all development is happening inside Windows or a Windows VM (Visual Studio and Notepad++ are Windows only). Sounds like a lot of folks are using Macs to host a Windows VM, which I see all the time. If you include a small portion of Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, Xamarin then you're probably approaching 80% of all development being done on gasp Windows.

Grue3 11y ago

A Stack Overflow poll is not representative of what developers use. Otherwise you'd have to believe that most developers code on Notepad in Windows. Indeed, people who learn to program, the target audience of Stack Overflow, often code in Notepad. I did too, before I switched to Emacs. And these days I only end up on Stack Overflow via occasional googling, and certainly wouldn't participiate in their polls.

mchahn 11y ago

The last geeky conference I went to, Github's Atom conference, I saw virtually nothing but Macbooks. I've even seen a presentation by Microsoft given on a Macbook.

sandGorgon 11y ago

People should really check out the new Thinkpad T460s - actual upgradability, looks spectacular, carbon fiber , brilliant Linux compatibility. Takes the new Samsung 960 Pro NVME and works brilliantly.

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